As I headed to Sydney for Mardi Gras this year, I received a phone call from my doctor to confirm, following very strong suspicions, that I had syphilis.

Receiving a positive STI test is often extremely isolating. Despite having symptoms for the week prior, I had not shared with anyone (expect for my partners) that something was going on.

On the train when I received the call, I felt the need to find the quietest spot possible, in case someone next to me heard what the doctor had to say. After being diagnosed, I didn’t tell most of friends or family – if I did, it would mean conversations about my sex life, and there are few ways that gay men can genuinely open up to being a slut in this world.

This sort of isolation, or even loneliness, follows me around wherever I go. I expect many other queer people experience it, too.

The loneliness is not one of being actually alone – I am surrounded by amazing friends and family who are extremely supportive. Instead, it is the loneliness of living in a society where most people around us do not share our history, are unwilling to talk about the things that often define our queerness (such as sex), and rarely want to understand the cultural moments that make us who we are.

It is the loneliness of knowing that we can only share the basics of our lives, but that if we go further, then we will be seen as strange, overly sexual, perverted or worse.

The most obvious way that this loneliness manifests is in any conversation about sex. I can easily tell my straight friends and family, for example, that I am going to Mardi Gras, and I’m happy to share photos of the costumes, glitz, and glamour of the parade.

The other parts of my visit, however – the underwear party, the visit to the nude beach, the sauna night (if I’d been able to go) – I remain tight-lipped about. It feels like these are parts of the gay experience that no one wants to acknowledge, even though they’re core to my enjoyment.

I’m not suggesting that I want to go and tell everyone at work the Monday after Mardi Gras about the most intimate parts of my sex life – I’m smart enough to know that is inappropriate. But I do feel that, nowadays, queerness is often stripped of the parts that make straight people uncomfortable.

As we’ve gained more mainstream visibility, being gay has become more about ‘identity’, with the ‘fucking’ being increasingly sanitised from the queer experience. So, it is easier – and often necessary – to keep that part of my existence locked up, only for me and my queer inner circle to know about. This trickles down to interactions all the time, with core parts of my life being whittled down to their most palatable elements.

Our heteronormative society wants to celebrate the Pride parade, or talk about the importance of letting people “be themselves”, but we can never talk about the gay sex party afterwards. That is too much.

This is not true when the roles are reversed. Straight cultural experiences are out in the open, for everyone to share. We see this in how cis-het couples talk about getting married or trying for babies (which, when spoken about in public, is coded language for “we’re fucking regularly”).

Straight men are happy to engage in locker room talk, and there are extensive cultural practices of straight women openly sharing their sexual experiences with each other (think about shows like Sex and the City, for example).

I’m not suggesting that straight people don’t hide anything – sex is still very taboo in all society – but the core parts of their stories are generally open for conversation. For us queer folks, that is often not the case.

This queer loneliness is amplified given the intersection between sex and queer history.

Even now, 40 years after the outbreak, it’s impossible to explain to some folks the impact the HIV/AIDS crisis has had on the consciousness of a lot of gay men.

When I was young, I spent restless nights worrying I had caught HIV, even though I’d done everything I could to be ‘safe’. There’s no doubt that these fears stopped me from exploring at times, and they certainly made me worry when I did.

I often had those moments in silence because I couldn’t share that I was having these gay experiences in the first place, and even if I did, no one would understand the fear. While the HIV/AIDS crisis is an important part of our history, we are often silent about its modern impacts for fear of what it may say about us and our ‘lifestyles’.

Yet, a deep sense of connection comes with this loneliness as well. When I got off the train in Sydney for Mardi Gras, I went to hang out with a gay friend I was spending a few days with. I almost immediately told him the news of my STI, and the frustration I had about the timing of it all (no sauna party for me!).

I was so glad that he was the first person I saw. He understood, he shared stories about when similar things happened to him, and he assisted me in finding a doctor to visit that afternoon to get my treatment. When I got to our hotel room, I found that he had bought beers and snacks to cheer me up – jokingly saying that he was disappointed that Woolworths didn’t have a “I’m sorry you’ve got an STI” cake.

Over the course of the weekend, this sense of connection continued – we checked out boys at an underwear party together, we hung out at Sydney’s nude gay beach, and when my partners joined us for the weekend, we all went together to a dance party full of sweaty half-naked men.

We did these things without any concern that we’d be judged.

I experience the joy of such moments around queer friends all the time. It’s not just a feeling of acceptance – I have that all the time. It’s the comfort of sharing parts of myself and my world that would just be unacceptable in other parts of society.

When you come out, you break down one of society’s biggest social norms. In talking with friends, I’ve found that the experience of coming out then makes people feel more comfortable breaking other social barriers as well. With my queer friends, I can therefore break down barriers about intimacy in ways that are extremely joyful and healing.

My gay loneliness only comes out when I have to step out of these spaces.

In many parts of this world, I still have to pretend – not that I’m straight, but more that I’m not thinking about that hook-up from the other night, that I’m not taking PrEP so I can have casual sex, or that I’m not going to spend my weekend at an underwear party. When really, I am – these are important parts of my life as a queer person.

I feel that this isolation from the mainstream still haunts many queer people. Luckily, it comes with its positives, too – like the ability to imagine the world differently.

I wouldn’t give that up for anything.